Which APIs Are Handling Billions of Requests Per Day?

A year ago we asked who belongs to the API billionaires club and listed several APIs that can count their API requests in the billions. Now there are many more API billionaires serving billions of requests every month. There is also a class of eight companies that are serving in the billions every single day, as shown in ProgrammableWeb Founder John Musser's talk today at Glue.

Google, Twitter and Facebook are all handling many billions of API calls per day. And if you look carefully, that data is at least a year old. Those companies are likely handling many more billions today.

In the case of Twitter and Facebook, most of the usage of these APIs is actually internal. All of Twitter's official clients, as well as its website, uses the Twitter API. And Facebook's mobile properties, which see 425 million users per month, are by far the largest user of the Facebook API.

Last year the list of billionaires fit on a single slide. This year, it takes at least two. If you click through Musser's slides (embedded above), you'll see the API billionaires that measure their requests in the billions per month. This extended list now includes big names like the LinkedIn API and Evernote API.

And yes, there are likely even more API billionaires. Which ones have we missed?

About the author:Adam DuVander
-- Adam heads developer relations at Orchestrate, a database-as-a-service company. He's spent many years analyzing APIs and developer tools. Previously he worked at SendGrid, edited ProgrammableWeb and wrote for Wired and Webmonkey. Adam is also the author of mapping API cookbook Map Scripting 101.